winter, quiet

January 2011

We look and look and look around in the winter as we do in any season.  Snow quiets everything.  Slows things down too.  My looking is mostly padded these days, so that variations in a scene seem not so often abrupt as they seem nuanced, attached to the tonal dance.  Still, the scenes are quite lively.

Have you read Robert Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening recently?  Is there impatience with stillness at the end of his poem?

Whose woods these are I think I know,

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound's the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.